Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Laterna Magica got dumped on pretty harshly in the IFComp, but it's by far the best last-place game I've seen since I've paid attention (2010.) I'd go so far as to call it the best bottom-three game I've seen. This seems like faint praise, but when I paged through the comp results, I was shocked to find it dead last.

Its last place finish is probably more a result of a stronger field than anything else. Though I can see why people may've disliked it--it's about a journey to ultimate enlightenment, but with loops. A lot of them. There's one choice buried in one loop that breaks another loop, and the text is deliberately obscure, perhaps too obscure. Your choices are questions with no right answers, and while this is part of the shtick, there are almost no ways to get any right answers or clues you are on the right path. It seems philosophically correct that we don't notice that we're getting smarter, but there's no sense of progress or hinting we're doing it wrong besides "oh, this again." I got a semi-messy map out of it, and I stumbled through, but ultimately I didn't feel enlightened.

And three months later, I can't remember what I did, and I'm a bit worried about going back to find out. So I can't say this is a favorite.

Still, the game has a coherent start, a good premise, and a way through that's logical once you see it. It doesn't soar, but it works. It may give unpleasant flashbacks to those books people flog on you at the airport as "gifts," with different spiels whether you're reading a book or not (but could you please give a donation?) & some of the text rattles on. And while I love some so-bad-it's-good, and I've even had fun poking through underimplemented games and reassembling them to find out what's going on, this game feels more like it had good intentions and clear focus on its own but it never translated to the enlightenment it tries to give the player.

I generally try not to rate games I competed against in IFComp, but I feel sad this game has a flat one star. Doing math on the previous ratings, it even needed a three-star rating to bump it up. I can't quite give that in good conscience, but two stars--definitely.

A year after EctoComp 2013, I found myself coming back to this game. It's a very good example of SpeedIF. While there's a lot that isn't implemented for you to examine, it's not critical to the story. The main focus is to run away from that beast that's chasing you.

From a technical level, you're just running around nine rooms avoiding a best that will kill you. It's possible to get stuck in a few places, but the game is short enough you can just replay. You can also find sanctuary from the beast to get several endings. I managed to get these, and they were still satifying despite not the "good" one that makes everything click--on re-playing, I see that a lot of hints were there. Though I sort of forgot for a bit about (Spoiler - click to show)The Wizard's Tower, as I may've assumed it was as impassable as the guard by the bridge to the village who wants money. But that's a minor hinting issue.

Speeding through this game under the deluge of IFComp 2013 entries, I missed that (Spoiler - click to show)the beast is half as fast as you, assuming instead that (Spoiler - click to show)the author wanted you to randomly teleport in the fairy ring. So somehow I managed to "fear" the beast and ascribe it more power than it had.

That's a good accomplishment for an EctoComp game. This is a high three stars in my rating, which for a speed game is very good indeed, and while I can't knock any game that placed above it--there were a lot of good ideas--I'm still surprised it wound up in the bottom half.

This is a twine game about being tall--well, not really. It's got a clever misdirection where your mother is upset at you for buying heels. But the arguments she looks may sound familiar. They are (Spoiler - click to show)the standard arguments against homosexuality. This is a funny look at something where people can get too serious or obscure, or the implication is too clumsy, and while the story seemed to drag slightly, it worked for me. I also enjoyed the shout out to (Spoiler - click to show)Randy Newman's "Short People" at the end, which seemed to expand things beyond the game's main issue and to conformity. Yet at the same time, it recalled when I got taller than my mother and sister and I was treated differently...for a bit. And I even felt a bit apologetic.

So the trick works for me. But I wish it would not have taken so long to get there. The text-manipulation tricks that cause pauses didn't work for me--they feel more like shareware nags than real-life pauses. I think it's okay that (Spoiler - click to show)your conversation choices don't matter, you won't change your parents' mind, and they want to rant, but on the other hand, piling this on to 5-10 second waits for relatively short dialog leaves the work feeling like filler. So a new argument I hadn't seen but liked got combined with text effects I had seen but didn't like. These text effects didn't ruin the game for me, but they did leave me reaching for my handy PERL tag-stripping script, which kind of killed immersion.

I get the sense that, with Twine being relatively new, cool elegant text effects exist we haven't discovered yet will be able to give the reader (or me, at any rate) more of the effect the author intended. Unfortunately, my reaction was "not this again." But I'm glad I worked through that.

I still prefer parser-based stuff, but PM was a well-done effort that managed to get the good parts of point and click (quick to navigate, immersive, easy to remember what you did) without the bad parts (tough to find the place to click for certain "puzzles.") On the strength of the map alone, which unlocks areas as you discover new evidence about aliens, PM is worth a go.

I mean, you can argue any Twine game is a point-and-click, but the big difference here is having a map you can look through and adjust. It's a bit above Bound, because there the map just described where you were in an apartment, and this was a cheerier, more absurdist mix of city and countryside.

There's only one puzzle in the game, which is (Spoiler - click to show)just remembering a string of four nonsense words, and while the writing doesn't soar, it's very pleasing to open up the university, the trendy areas in a city, and the secret passage from/to the desert.

ShuffleComp had many successful experiments, but this game felt like it built on several experiments the author tried themselves. I forget if I gave it a commended vote, but it was on the fence. It had sensible organization to go with a goofy back plot (the silliness quotient feels about right,) and that is always a good combination. Plus it reminded me I really wanted to listen to more Frank Zappa, and a side aim of the competition was to expose people to new music.

I don't have a ton of conspiracy theories, myself, but for so long, I was simply unable to tell theorists to stop with that nonsense, already, whether it was about workplace, classroom or global politics. It's so tempting to listen, because that stuff's imaginative if you haven't heard it, yet it dies out.

Fortunately, conspiracy theory is fertile ground for satire, and The Cabal hits a lot of good points. It collapses several favorite political theories, places and lore into being about text adventures. This highlighted, to me, how conspiracy theorists like the me-me-me angle while really it's just more about an uncaring world and people willing to accept how things are to get by.

There's only one potentially vicious part. Though most characterizations are clear jokes, one personality is depicted as living at Ruby Ridge, which left me uncomfortable enough to look for an explanation. I got one here--well, at an archive.org copy of it--and was impressed. The essay's worth it even if it's a necessary distraction from an otherwise free-flowing game, because it hits on conspiracy theories some writers have when really it's about laziness or time limitation. It's also nice to have conspiracy literature that actually cleans things up.

I found the puzzles worked as conspiracy debunkers by giving you the opportunity to go off on useless tangents. So many of them (Spoiler - click to show)give the solution up front, then provide absorbing writing so it's possible to get caught up in details that utterly don't matter. The final maze is particularly funny, as (Spoiler - click to show)the game seems far more likely to trap you if you map it by UNDOing.

The author did the right thing by throwing a large chunk of this work into multiple-choice conversation. It establishes the character-player as someone with bizarre thoughts but never really kicks him--it's more about outlining your basic conspiracy theory fallacies. It's good for a thoughtful laugh, even for someone who wasn't present when the game was released.

While I can't find fault with any of the commended games in ShuffleComp 2014, which was a pretty strong competition, I'm a bit disappointed Truth missed out. It's very old-school parser stuff about finding and exposing lies. They can be exaggerations or oversimplifications or clunky wordplay society's grown to accept for convenience.

Whichever it is, it's not hard to find by lawn-mowering. The usual suspects pop up, with ads that lie, politicians, clergymen, and so forth. Though the lies are generally stretched so the game never does something boring like have an agenda. Just examine everything, including (Spoiler - click to show)a line of Keats's poetry (the one about the urn)and you'll get all 21 points. But instead of getting points, you unearth truths, debunk fibs, etc.

As a bonus point for amusement, the author's pseudonym is a trivial truth. Before people revealed who they were, it was pretty clear the author was, indeed, an earthling. Which was just the sort of direct joke that worked so well in the game. And what a tidy game it is--it fits into the Z5 format!

Also, I had some knowledge with my truth, (Spoiler - click to show)"beagle puss" as the Groucho disguise you expose for the final point and a Final Revelation. I like that you can Find The Truth even before getting all the points, too.

I wrote a song about this game. It has three verses. One for each choice you make. So you can sing it while you play.

"Aaaah" noises in background throughout...last 2 syllables of each line repeated, except the final in the verse which is drawn out. BBAgg, GGGGDE

(Spoiler - click to show)
You must reach...the lift (the lift the lift the lift)/on the graveyard shift/if you get my drift/danger has been sniffed/
Zombies to be biffed/porn and kleenex gift/No time to feel stiffed/Your fate may be swift
Not much that's what-iffed/You just got short shrift/Hey now don't get miffed/now this song's adrift


This game swung and whiffed.

But seriously, this guy seems like a decent artist, if you google.

Bell Park was cathartic for me. Nothing terribly serious, really. It just made it easier to laugh at the tales of Haledjiann and Encyclopedia Brown that baffled me so much as a nine year old. So I gave this game a 2013 IFComp Miss Congeniality vote over a few other strong efforts that were tough to leave out.

I was apparently supposed to be impressed and motivated, but I was just intimidaed. I almost never got any of them, and even when I reread one of the books years later, that whole frustration returned to me. Even the well-written CYOA Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey (available on OpenLibrary) left me awed--though I was younger when I read it.

Bell Park kicks the concept when it's down, though. Bell never really stands a chance with the adult world, taking every possible wild guess and going with it. Or to be more accurate, the game lets you go through all the guesses. there is a lot to laugh at, from the condescending and clueless adults to Bell's constant change of assuredness as to the murderer. Her formulated accusations are perfect for her age, and if the actual murderer is completely unbelievable (if very amusing and creative,) I can easily remember having my opinion on several adults--famous and non-famous--when I was young. This game captures that sharply and without malice.

Some people claimed about the lack of interactivity and different endings, that is about the only fault I can find with the game. Something small like different endings depending on how many choices you/Bell lawnmowered through would be a neat boost, but I can't complain.

Also, the game's Twine layout just looks like a book. The font, spacing and page size. Once I saw it, I wondered why nobody had done it before. I suspect there's a lot more of this stuff you can do with twine. I hope to see it. As well as the straight-ahead just plain writing that Twine lets you do and that this author is good at.

Mines of Qyntarr is an unquestionably awful game. It plays like when I wrote BASIC tributes to Zork--or I would've if they hadn't run out of memory. Lots of points to collect, lots of simple but illogical puzzles except for the ones based on received knowledge, and lots of verbs to guess. And far too many locations to fit on one piece of paper.

You drop treasures in a well, which is not the trophy case from Zork I. There's a cool talking idol, but there's also a puzzle where the challenge is mostly to look up Funambulate by looking in a dictionary--that's like googling, for you younguns--and another that is different on the Apple than the PC (Spoiler - click to show)"Approach Queen" vs "Checkmate". Plus there's a monster called a yallou, which couldn't be copied at all from the grue.

Sir-Tech bit the dust soon after this, so the promised sequel never happened. I can't say I'm really sad. I wasted money on Wizardry I so I could play II and III. I just thought the games were too tough for me at the time. I'm just not sure I've ever seen such a large-scale, categorically awful game as this. Well, not one you would pay for. It even made me feel like a schmuck for wanting to write a game exactly like this as a twelve-year-old.

Mercer Mayer's illustrations were part of my youth. They really brought the Great Brain series alive--which itself could make some good text adventures, with Tom D.'s scheming and puzzle solving. So when I confirmed he was the author of this text adventure nobody'd written a solution for, I figured it'd be fun to try.

Angelsoft parsers, though, tended to be not quite up to Infocom's--undoing doesn't work, and the randomized responses for nonworking verbs are just baffling. And they didn't have those neat InvisiClues. Which were almost necessary for Forbidden Castle. Mayer imagined a very cute world: a gnome with a weird belt, an ogre, a fairy, and other things that'd been done before, but the real charm of this game is how you can ride a dragon or pegasus to places you need to get. The whole map is connected at the end, but you don't see how at first--and there are plenty of weird deaths in the isolated areas if you do things wrong.

And you need to learn what magic items do--you're not told. Some help you around some magical beasts but hurt you around other. Wearing a sword gets you killed. Insta-deaths zap you a lot here, and it's not clear why. You can also assume it's a good idea to (Spoiler - click to show)pick up the bag on the first move, but if you don't, you're totally lost. The game gets in trouble a lot here.

The technical annoyances and Player Bill of Rights violationscan't quite obscure the imagination, though, so a walkthrough is recommended. But there is too much verb guessing and cheap death for an honest play-through. Most people won't have the patience for that.